Has any living singer encompassed more facets of womanhood on stage than Catherine Malfitano?
Just last month at Lyric Opera, audiences for Puccini’s “Il Trittico” got a triple bill of Malfitano heroines as the American soprano portrayed an adulterous wife (Georgetta in “Il Tabarro”), a self-sacrificing nun (the title role in “Suor Angelica”) and a sweetly cajoling daughter (Lauretta in “Gianni Schicchi”) in a marathon that earned her a tumultuous reception at her operatic home base.
Now Malfitano is about to add yet another fascinating female to her Lyric gallery of portraits: the teenage princess of Richard Strauss’ “Salome,” in the celebrated Salzburg Festival production by Luc Bondy that opens this weekend at the Civic Opera House.
Salome has proved a kind of talisman role for the singer, as she pointed out in a recent conversation at the Near North Side townhouse she occupies with her family–husband Stephen Hollowid and 10-year-old daughter Daphne Rose–during her residencies at Lyric.
Offstage, Malfitano comes across as a strong, take-charge person–just like the heroines and anti heroines she portrays on stage. At 48, this working wife and mother is a portrait of glowing good health, the result of a strict vegetarian diet and an exercise-and-weight lifting regimen that helps her through the physically stressful work she does on stage.
When Malfitano took on Salome for the first time in her career, it was 1990 with the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, at the urging of conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli. The role marked for her a crucial plunge into the dramatic-soprano territory a lot of opera people had warned her about, fearing that singing heavyweight parts like Salome, Berg’s Lulu and Puccini’s Butterfly and Tosca would ruin her voice.
“Before I sang those Berlin Salomes, even close friends were placing bets on it being a failure,” she says. “Then they saw the performance, and later the video of the televised performance, and told me, `You’ve proved us wrong.’ “
Did she feel vindicated? “That was the short-term feeling. What really was important about that experience . . . was the sense of believing in myself. I like to think I have exploded barriers. One of the things that worry me about many singers today is that they don’t take enough risks. My risks have always been calculated, based on in-depth vocal study and willingness to invest so much emotionally in the parts I sing. I have never tackled things on a whim, just to see if I can survive.”
The success of those Salomes led to Malfitano’s being cast as the Strauss femme fatale in the 1992 Salzburg production that is having its American premiere, courtesy of the Lyric. Yet another successful round of “Salomes” last March at the Metropolitan Opera reminded New Yorkers what Chicagoans have known since her Lyric debut in 1975 (as Susanna in Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro”): Malfitano is one of opera’s smartest, most versatile singing actresses.
Matthew Epstein, Lyric’s artistic adviser and a vice president at Columbia Artists Management who has helped guide Malfitano’s career since the 1970s, says he believes the artist is in her performance prime, and likely to remain so for years to come. “Look at the singers of Catherine’s generation who haven’t stayed the distance, or haven’t kept audiences intrigued by what they’re doing,” he says. “She has excelled in every area of the repertory–French, German, Italian, modern. Usually I don’t believe in diversity, but Catherine has made an enormous success of that diversity.”
For her part, Malfitano says, “Like a butterfly, I keep reappearing in new guises, even to myself.” One thing that has allowed her to do that is the fact that she retooled her vocal technique in the 1980s with the help of the late conductor Henry Lewis. The rest owes to having plotted her career carefully and systematically, choosing operas that balance the dramatic and purely vocal demands, in theaters that allow her to work with directors, conductors and other singers who share her dedication to good old-fashioned hard work.
Her colleagues confirm that dedication.
“The biggest thing I have learned from Catherine is the concentration she brings to rehearsal periods,” says Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, who, as the possessed prophet Jochanaan, literally loses his head to her Salome in the Lyric production. “Our scene together lasts perhaps 10 minutes, but the sparks really fly.”
The soprano sees a close parallel between the commitment opera singers must bring to a performance and the collective commitment of a top sports club. “Living in Chicago, I have become a great Bulls fan, which is why I am reading Phil Jackson’s book, `Sacred Hoops.’ The way he coaches his players is to honor the ensemble spirit, which is something I constantly talk about in opera. Phil respects his star players but he doesn’t see them as more important than other team members. It’s the same with me: When I work, I don’t consider myself above anyone else in the ensemble. If anything, my responsibility is to draw everyone up to my level, kind of how Michael Jordan does.”
Beyond that, Malfitano says she enjoys working with directors who challenge her dramatic skills and physical resilience. She was tossed around the stage like a rag doll in Lyric’s world-premiere production of William Bolcom and Robert Altman’s “McTeague.” She fearlessly shed all seven veils in a scorching dance at the climax of the Deutsche Oper “Salome,” the video of which carries a “frontal nudity” warning. She had to shimmy down a circus rope in a Munich production of “Lulu” and twisted herself into an old hag in Schreker’s “Der ferne Klang,” in Vienna.
The intense dramatic involvement Malfitano brings to her women has, however, given rise to the notion that she is engaged more often for her acting ability and striking stage presence than for her vocal assets. Not so, says Malfitano. “In every circumstance, I am hired for what I can offer not only as an actress but as a singer,” she declares. “What people must understand is that it’s the conductors, not the directors, who do the hiring. If that’s not the biggest argument for my singing, I don’t know what is.
“Of course,” the singer adds, “I know from working with all these conductors that they would be happy if I did less from a dramatic point of view. But they also know I have a vocal technique that can withstand what other singers would call abuse.”
If such forthright assertions give the impression that Malfitano is one of those stereotypical divas who enjoy humbling everyone in their vicinity, opera professionals are quick to insist otherwise. “Of course Catherine is difficult to work with–I don’t know any good artist who isn’t,” says Epstein. “But she’s difficult only in the sense that she’s a strong, opinionated, enormously disciplined person. The best artists are made up of insecurity and arrogance combined; with her, the combination is balanced by enormous intelligence.”
Adds Ardis Krainik, Lyric’s general director, “I don’t feel Catherine is a prima donna in the bad sense. She’s a true artist, always striving for the best, never wavering in her attention to the performance at hand.”
Having portrayed a staggering array of opera’s virtuous heroines, amoral heroines, ageless heroines, neurotic heroines and hapless heroines, are there any major soprano roles Malfitano has on her docket? Her eyes widen as she contemplates her crowded schedule between now and the year 2000. Next year the singer plans to push the vocal envelope still further by singing her first Lady Macbeth, in Verdi’s “Macbeth,” a new David Alden production shared by Chicago and Houston. Also on the books for 1998 is Kurt Weill’s “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” for Salzburg. She also has her eye on two Wagner heroines, Senta in “Der Fliegende Hollander” and Kundry in “Parsifal.”
“The end of a career comes so quickly for singers. It feels too short–it will always feel too short,” Malfitano reflects. “So, part of the enjoyment of every moment that happens in one’s career has to come from feeling you are doing everything you really wish to do, searching out all your possibilities.
“Singing is my life. I have to sing to feel whole. I like being in front of people and sharing life experiences through music, because it’s an extension of the mystery of performing. One day when I’m not singing, I will have to find other things to fill that need.” For now, Malfitano says with a laugh, “I can’t think of a profession where one is allowed to be at once a child and an adult–to live fantasy and reality at the same time, and be paid for it.”
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THE FACTS
`Salome’
When: Through Dec. 20
Where: Lyric Opera, Civic Opera House, 20 N. Wacker Drive
Tickets: $45-$112
Call: 312-332-2244
